I don't think that going it alone in debian sid is really that bad at all. Of my four pc's, they all used to be kanotix. I learned a lot from this and am grateful for kano and the team. For a few months now 3 of my pc's are pure debian sid. I find those installs much cleaner and more stable. So I don't think going it alone in sid is that bad, as long as you know the basics and have backups.

Debian has come a long way, and it's fairly easy to install debian "testing" by yourself ... download a "netinst CD image":
http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-installer/
(go to the daily built images section)
burn the cd, boot from it, press enter at the prompt and it'll guide you through the installation.

But that will install "testing" ... to install sid, change your sources.list to unstable, and do an "apt-get dist-upgrade".

But you've only got gnome ... to install kde, do "apt-get install kdm kde" (or "apt-get install kdm kde-core" if you only want the core stuff).

If you have an nvidia card, then either install the driver from the nvidia site, or follow steps here:
http://home.comcast.net/~andrex/Debian- ... ation.html
or, if you have a standard kernel that's in the repos, simple do:
apt-get install module-assistant nvidia-kernel-common
m-a prepare
m-a auto-install nvidia
apt-get install nvidia-glx
apt-get install nvidia-xconfig
nvidia-xconfig
Ctrl-Alt-Backspace

I'd recommend "apt-get upgrade" from here on instead of "apt-get dist-upgrade" ... and if you want to upgrade a specific app then upgrade it specifically, eg when iceweasel come out, I did "apt-get install firefox" to upgrade it, and it installed iceweasel. Avoiding dist-upgrades leads to a more stable system. Note that you have to do a dist-upgrading once when upgrading from testing to sid.